1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for anticipating side effects manifested in a patent undergoing a dialysis treatment. More precisely, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for monitoring and detecting early indications of the manifestation of undesirable side effects such as, for example, nausea, vomiting, hypotension, headaches and above all, collapse.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, there are three fundamental intervention procedures for avoiding adverse side effects during dialysis treatment. According to a first procedure, an operator or a nurse takes periodic measurements (every half hour, every hour) of the arterial pressure, cardiac rate and, in certain cases, weight loss. This monitoring is discontinuous and intermittent and the responsibility for the monitoring is entrusted exclusively to the operator who intervenes according to visual assessments of the patient's condition and the patient's own suggestion. It is obvious that this procedure does not allow for immediate corrective interventions necessary to prevent any malaise in the patient which frequently appears quite suddenly.
A second control procedure utilizes knowledge of the physiological dialysis process to adjust the dialysis machine to allow it to perform treatments with the least possible disturbance effect. The results are distinctly better than those obtained according to the first intervention procedure referred to above. However, it has not yet been possible to prevent the manifestation of collapse (certainly the most characteristic and one of the most serious side effects) precisely because certain machines are programmed to bring certain treatment parameters as close as possible to those which have been considered to be most adequate (on a theoretical basis) for the patent undergoing dialysis, without utilizing signals coming from the patient himself. Possible corrective and/or preventive interventions are, in certain cases, even left to the operator's discretion.
A third control procedure takes into account specific signals ascertained in the patient. Such a procedure is the subject of research in the field of dialysis and has not yet given rise to satisfactory concrete embodiments, either because of the difficulties in identifying and measuring certain fundamental physical characteristics of the patient or because of difficulty in defining an efficient strategy for processing and utilizing signals corresponding to the above-mentioned characteristics. The present invention effectively overcomes this difficulty.
An object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus capable of anticipating, with a good level of reliability, the appearance of side effects manifesting themselves in a patient undergoing a dialysis treatment, allowing an operator to intervene in good time and/or to automatically activate a procedure preventing the appearance of such effects.